In the February 2016 survey we received responses from 933,892,520 sites and 5,796,210 web-facing computers.

Microsoft has edged closer towards Apache, with an increase of 16.1 million sites bringing its total up by 6.14% to 279 million. Apache's relatively modest growth of 0.66% has put Microsoft within 3 percentage points of Apache's leading market share of 32.8%.

In terms of web-facing computers, Apache maintains a much clearer lead with a 47.8% share of the market. Microsoft also takes second place by this metric, albeit with a share that is more than 20 percentage points behind Apache. However, both Apache and Microsoft suffered small losses in market share as nginx continues to exhibit strong growth: This month, nginx gained 21,100 computers, increasing its market share by 0.26 points to 13.96%.

nginx 1.9.11 mainline was released on 9th February. This version introduced support for dynamic modules, enabling selective loading of both third-party and some native modules at runtime. In previous versions, nginx modules had to be statically linked into an nginx binary built from source, causing the module to be loaded every time even if it was not going to be used.

The latest version of Microsoft Internet Information Services, IIS 10.0, is still very rare in the wild, as its primary deployment platform (Windows Server 2016) has yet to be released. Fewer than 5,000 websites are currently using IIS 10.0, and these are being served either from technical preview versions of Windows Server 2016, or from Windows 10 machines.

The latest technical preview version of Windows Server 2016 also supports a headless deployment option known as Nano Server. This is a stripped-down version of Windows Server, without a graphical interface and a few other features that are not essential for modern web applications. As a result, it typically requires fewer updates to be installed – and consequently, fewer reboots, too.

Despite losing a small amount of market share, Apache also showed a reasonable growth of 15,600 computers. Similar to last month, a significant proportion of this growth was due to the appearance of more Western Digital My Cloud consumer storage devices.

The total number of My Cloud devices in the survey now stands at 583,400, which is 68,400 more than last month; however, the number of devices that are exposed directly to the internet grew by only 11,100.

Western Digital is using Amazon AWS to host the servers that proxy requests to My Cloud devices in Relay mode. Most of these relay servers have been configured to serve a few thousand devices each, and so the 331,000 devices that are currently using Relay mode contribute fewer than 200 computers towards Apache's total.

Interestingly, while most web-facing My Cloud devices are hosted in the US, more than half of the *.wd2go.com hostnames used by the relay servers are hosted in Amazon's EU regions.

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